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5 thoughts on “2009 Viable Paradise XIII Applications ARE open…”

I tried to get into Clarion a couple of years ago and performed one of my more effective acts of self-sabotage — I reformatted my manuscript at the last minute and didn’t double-check my page count… And my pieces didn’t have much fantastic content anyway.

Since then I’ve been thinking that Clarion is probably beyond my physical capacity — six weeks of standing and sitting away from my recliner would likely see me stuck in bed by the halfway point.

But a week? I could handle a week. So I looked at my stories and found one that I really like that’s broken somewhere — around fifty-five hundred words. Now to write a second that’ll fit inside the remainder of the word count…

Thanks for the temptation. It’ll be interesting to see how I blow it this time.

As a graduate of VPXII, I want to say to all of you thinking about applying: DO IT! VP was the best thing for my writing and came at the right time in my life. It’s an *amazing* experience, and you come out the other end with a tribe of people who totally understand what you’re going through. I’ve heard others say that if you’re questioning whether to apply, you’re at the stage when you should. And it’s sound advice. And Sean: chill dude. Don’t defeat yourself up front. We all do stupid crap; the trick is to learn from it and carry on. Good luck!

So. I sent short fiction instead of the novel, because there isn’t any fantastic content in the first eight-thousand words, and I’m not sure how well social realism about a mentally ill janitor would go over. Instead, I sent one science fiction story and one fantasy. Neither of them is soul-crushingly bleak or otherwise the obvious product of a diseased mind.

I kept the submissions well under the word count.

I went through the requested laborious process of preparing the manuscripts for email submission.

I enclosed the check.

I kept the cover letter to one page. I did not beg.

Of course I left out an important ‘don’t’ in the cover letter, but hopefully that isn’t a crippling flaw.

So how did I self-destruct on this one? Simple. In reading the instructions for email submissions, I read the very strongly stated request for .rtf files as a request for .txt files.

Repeatedly.

Over a period of days.

I just sent out the properly formatted files. But now I’m wondering what else the evil Sean has done to screw things up for me…